flesh is heretic
by strangervision
Summary: Written for a prompt at avengerkink.lj; Natasha loses control and tries to get it back by pushing her body farther than it can take. Warning for possible Eating Disorder triggers.


_Flesh is heretic.  
My body is a witch.  
I am burning it._

_Anorexic, Eavan Boland_

After the chaos, Natasha is wildly disoriented. The Fury has put missions on hold until the cleanup for Manhattan is done, and it's taking surprisingly longer than everyone thinks it should. Since this means missions are also on hold, Natasha and Clint are shuffled along with the rest of the Avengers into Stark Tower for a rest.

Amidst all the stillness and quiet, Natasha cannot find her footing. More often than not, her mind wanders to her previous missions and this is where she finds it: her body has never been hers to control. In every mission she's been sent on she uses those, and her emotions, to manipulate the mark and take them down but she's never had a say in that. She doesn't quite know how to feel with her heart and not her head anymore; doesn't quite know how to treat her body as a _body_ and not a weapon as it always has been. The more she thinks about this, the more she feels herself spiraling out of her own control.

She's tough, so she runs away by throwing herself into physical activities and not leaving room in her head for thought. It's what she does best anyway. She spars with Clint, and then Cap, and would spar with the Hulk if Bruce would let her – but maybe not, since the Hulk is an embodiment of something and that hits too close to home. The Hulk is Bruce losing some semblance of control, and Natasha cannot take him on without thinking of how, everyday, she loses it a little more.

No one notices, thanks to her tough training schedule at SHIELD anyway. People do not become master assassins without spending more than half their lives training. When the sparring is done, Natasha runs. She runs like the Hulk is hot on her heels, like she did in the detention barracks, like she's never quite run before. There's both distance and speed in her steps, and sometimes she doesn't want to stop. It started as running away, as training until she left no breath and no space in her mind to think about the ground shaking beneath her feet, but if she lets herself think about it now, it's more about control than anything else. After all, this is not a schedule anymore. This is choice, and active decision made by her to control her own body, to treat her body like a puppet on strings she can move. This is her pushing her body to the limit to see what it can do, to know that it can do better.

Natasha doesn't stop eating yet, not until the exercise melts from control into a routine. It's not enough for her – she is still stepping across a landmine, unsure of herself and where she stands in the wake of a war. She can train all she wants, but there is only so much control in it and when her body begins to weaken from the excessive work out, Clint starts to beat her at sparring. He seems to know to catch her off-guard, or when she swings a second too slow. The nagging at the pit of her stomach is back, the voice in the back of her mind that always goads her, _are you really in control, is this you, are you the puppeteer?_

The first time she refuses dinner for the punching bag, a sick swell of pride ignites a small flame in her. She keeps a straight, apathetic expression, hits at the punching bag until she nearly collapses, and then allows herself a bottle of water. She doesn't speak of it to anyone, but now the voice is saying, _hey, that felt good, deciding when you eat and when you exercise, no?_

She doesn't give it the satisfaction of admitting it to herself, as if that would make her growing obsession over control tangible somehow. It already has a life of its own, whether she knows it or not, anyway.

The second time, she stays in the training room with the machines and the treadmill; doesn't so much forget about lunch and dinner as she does consciously skip it. She hopes no one notices. Clint comes down hours after dinner to spar with her like she's asked him to. She gets away from the elliptical to meet him on the mat, and he looks at her like he knows something he doesn't want to say. He spars with her anyway, but it takes more effort than usual for her to beat him. Even then his breath isn't coming as fast as it usually does and there's something in his eyes that she hates to see. She turns away.

The third time, she's barely recovering from a flu when she comes down to the gym. It's morning, and she's only had an apple and some yoghurt when she starts on the treadmill. 7 kilometres later, Clint walks into the gym, slows the meter down until she's walking, and shuts of the machine. He looks at her like he's expecting her to talk, because he can already tell. Natasha walks calmly to the weights and begins her sit-ups, all the while priding herself on not losing control of the situation. She's tight-lipped about this new regime, eating less than is healthy (fruits for breakfast, a small cup of muesli for lunch and maybe water for dinner), and avoiding anyone when they start to ask or look at her in that sickening way (like she's losing control, like she needs sympathy, but she knows she isn't and she's more in control of this than she has been).

The fourth is challenge like any other day, but she feels like pain is weakness leaving the body, is her tightening the reins on her body and her life for once. The fifth blurs into the sixth, then the seventh and eighth, and Natasha is surprised at the back of her mind, and maybe a little glad, that no one has noticed what she's doing. It's not like she's completely not eating, she does eat enough to satisfy the wary glances thrown her way once in a while. Clint doesn't say anything either, but when he eats or happens to be training too, he looks at her, always that steady, silent, _hawk_ look, like he's watching for her to break.

Eventually, when Cap won her one too many times in sparring, he stops agreeing to fight with her.

It goes on for weeks, Natasha doesn't know. She only knows feeling like she's got this under control again, despite how tired she is. In fact, the more tired she is, the more she's convinced she's pushing her body harder than it can take, and she revels in the extent to which she can do this. _Mind over matter_, right? Natasha can do that, has always done that.

It all comes to a screeching halt when she's sparring with Clint again. He's slower, gentler, or maybe her eyes are just stinging from sweat since it's well past noon. Then his outline is fuzzy, and she's wondering why he's fading in and out of her vision, and all of a sudden they aren't even sparring anymore. Maybe if she were honest with herself, she'll admit that this was coming no matter how fast she ran from it. She'd been spiraling and in the way it's so easy to watching a ball turning in a spring not know which direction it's going, she'd thought she was going upwards, not down. She was wrong. It was an illusion – like the optical one she'd seen once. Natasha's mind is hazy when she thinks, _this is like when Pinnochio became a real boy_, and collapses because she is so tired. She only knows that Clint catches her.

When she comes to, Clint is sitting on the edge of the bed she's in, watching her still. She shifts, uneasy, because she knows that this time he's going to call the bluff and she's trapped here, not in control. When he says her name she flinches, because his voice is firm and she knows that he wants answers she doesn't want to; cannot give. When he says her name his voice is his; commanding and gentle at the same time, and she almost wants to cry because it forces her to think of how much control she's lost in the past weeks. Almost. She doesn't, because Widow never cries.

"Nat," he says, "What are you doing?" the way he did when he saw her _controlling_ that alien, Loki hot on her heels.

Confused, helpless and feeling the smallest she's ever felt, she tries to speak and can only manage one sentence, "I wanted to be in control."

Now he looks like he wants to cry, and she turns away because she doesn't want to see the painful reminder of how, instead of rebuilding her walls, she's completely left herself with nothing to hang onto. He turns away for one short moment, and she wants to ask him to leave but she knows he won't, so she just lies there, pliant and somewhat contrite, before he turns and lifts her against him, just holding her quietly.

She doesn't know what to say, has never known what to say when her emotions go to her heart and not her head; when she's not manipulating someone, so she says, "I'm sorry," because it seems the most appropriate. He continues to hold her.

"You need help," he says, and she starts to shake her head because no, she has this in control, she can handle it, she's Black Widow, but her just folds her tighter into him and begs, "Let me help you. Please."

Fear coils in the pit of her stomach, because she cannot be dependent on anyone, because _you cannot make anyone your home, your cornerstone, people leave and you can't blame them, so you cannot be attached to them either_. She wants to struggle, but out of fatigue opts instead to lean into him.

"Fine," she murmurs, and he feels his insides squeeze at how tired she sounds, the first he's hear from her in days. Reflex has her wanting to recoil and yell at him and fight him to go away, but for the first time in weeks she's genuinely tired of fighting, literally and mentally, so she settles for telling him that he will only help her in her conditions.

After all, here is what she will admit, if she's in the mood to search her insides and her mind until she gets lost in herself: she trusts Clint – maybe cannot, will not be dependent on him, but she trusts him, and she hopes maybe if he has control, then she can learn to do that too. Someday.


End file.
